Being a developer in today’s world is easy, but just typing code is not what makes a developer. Each job is different and as a developer, you are only using the logic for the code. The whole software/service being created is a complex set of processes that only the people involved from the beginning understand and have made plans for, more like product engineering.

The question here is for the developers who join much later. What drives their passion? Is it the monetary benefits and other freebies or a true passion to take a particular product forward?
I am not including the top brands here. Small consultancy/service companies are being considered.

Sometimes I wonder what I am doing is what I always wanted to do. My response is vague. I grew up as technology evolved. I was there when people were building static web pages, websites became dynamic, services were huge monoliths, then moved to SOA. I began exactly when microservices took off and I was part of the bandwagon. Today everything is moving into the cloud and what is the next thing that you see on the horizon: web3.

Web3, Crypto, Blockchain. No one is sure how it will impact the future, but I want to be in the driver’s seat when new things are adopted on a larger scale.

Today I work on Microservices and Cloud Platforms. My first code was vanilla JavaScript which just said hello on an HTML page. I tried my hand at game development but soon gave up. Guess I’m good at playing games. Dabbled in Android development, and made some apps that dint take off. But the fun of working on new things kept me going. On the side, I wanted to understand networking, which essentially is the underlying magic. I can say I understand a fair amount of it now. Developers need to understand networks, the basic command, and concepts. It’s always good to know stuff. I vividly remember watching a YouTube video of a Google developer showing the demo of App Engine. I was completely dumbstruck. I didn’t understand the demo at that point in time, but I wanted to do it.

Tried once to sit down to write a compiler using online resources of course but turned out too hectic with my daily job. However, I was able to bootstrap an OS, again with some tutorials. The feeling was surreal.

One thing that remains out of reach for me is trying out Raspberry Pi. There is the feeling of interacting with raw hardware plus writing software, which makes it equally exciting.

I started blogging recently. I don’t have major tech topics to talk about, rather developer experience is what I try to focus on. No matter what technologies come and go., the developer experience drives the change.

Becoming a developer was something I always wanted from the beginning. But who exactly is a developer was difficult to understand.

There is no rule that things will go as planned and to this, we leave most things to fate. What I feel is that in the end, puzzles fall into place when we least expect them.